‘If you want to torture somebody, first show them your tools’ is one of the better horror game design lessons taught by Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I thought of Amnesia’s cistern chapter while playing through a later area in Lunar Software’s excellent first-person spookathon Routine, announced 13 long years ago, though only in active development for around five. The area centres on a curious underground tree, with water dripping from a hydroponic ceiling and sealed doors on all sides. You can imagine Amnesia’s Shadow manifesting here, clogging the roots with acid rot as it homes in on your comically loud footfalls.

I also thought of Alien – of moisture splashing on Brett’s upturned face while he searches for Jonesy in the guts of the Nostromo. Routine is so indebted to that film and the hallmarks of that era that it inevitably risks feeling hollow. The game’s desolate moonbase setting is a late 1970s to 1980s vision of the future, made up of curving Macintosh plastic and cathode-ray crackle. It has the jaw-dropping lustre and formaldehyde reek of a very expensive museum, every room and corridor perfectly composed, however trashed and darkened, every in-world computer display a marvel of speculative 1-bit OS design.

Your only equipment in Routine is a boxy and bevelled multiple-purpose CAT scanner with a camcorder display and accessories you have to manually peer at and pop from the casing, as though ejecting cassettes. It’s the kind of thing I’d have gone crackers over as a kid who dreamed of getting a tricorder for Xmas… Who am I fooling? I’d go crackers over it today. You’ll find a module for your CAT in a mall showroom, and there’s a nagging sense that that’s where Routine ultimately belongs, but the game powers through the sheeny nostalgia.

In some ways, it’s a more exciting piece of horror than Alien: Isolation, which launched a couple of years after Routine’s announcement. Mostly, that’s because it doesn’t have an Alien, one of the most overexposed monsters in gaming. It has other dangers that need to be encountered and deciphered, with uncommon care. You’ve likely seen the robots in trailers: there’s a nasty trick to their operation, a simple variable that cultivates a relatively novel kind of suspense, and they’re not the only thing you have to worry about. Routine also has an impressive knack for foreshadowing, which makes it a shame that the developers have spoiled certain aspects of enemy behaviour in pre-release coverage. Beware of more potential spoilers from here.

So yes, let’s return to that opening Amnesia quote. Show us your tools, Routine! The room with the tree is the centre of a small maze of scanning facilities, server rooms, receptions and terminals. I was calm when I stole into the place – I’d just survived a baptism of fire in chapter 3, around four of seven hours in, a climax I mistook for the end of the game, and Routine had rewarded me with a bizarre floral transition and the chance to grapple with new mysteries.

I thought the pressure was off, and it was, for a handful of minutes. I set out from the hub, having procured the means to unseal one set of doors, and immediately came across computer docs that began layering up hints of a resident threat. Which might sound like a clunky piece of set dressing, a la “Hack off their limbs” in Dead Space, but Routine drags out the payoff to marvellous effect. Having given me just enough material to scrape together some rudimentary engagement tactics, it left me to shuffle through more doors and creep through vents, grasping at the threads of puzzles and returning often to a central computer near the area savepoint. Quite naturally, I saw evidence of my half-understood enemy everywhere.

Above all, I heard it in the walls. Routine boasts a vast menagerie of ambient machine noises – dire reverberations that tickle with the suggestion of guttural lungs and lips, dirging their resentment from deep within the world as you blunder about pushing buttons and rousing dormant systems. It’s just the aircon, you tell yourself, listening to the bulkheads moan. It’s just some turbine that some asshole specifically designed to sound like a dying elephant.

Elsewhere, there are magnetic tape storage units that chatter to themselves unpredictably, like hibernating droids in Star Wars, and speakers playing noisy synth that are absolutely maddening because they stop you hearing anything else nearby. Now, combine those persistent, corrosive acoustic elements with the screech and slam of a motorised door. Every door in Routine opens far faster than necessary and always sounds a little like something bursting through that door in a flurry of teeth. I actually found myself shushing them. For god’s sake, doors! You are going to wake it up. Wherever and whatever it is.

You horror junkies are reading all this and thinking “aww, look at Baby getting to grips with some bread-and-butter sci-fi fixtures and elementary dramatic build-up”. Well, the other twist is that I’m fairly sure Routine uses familiarity with such things against you. It’s not just that your surroundings sound like they’re coming to life, to say nothing of abysmally long hallways with the regulation Object In Shadow at the far end, or pure slabs of negative space that cry out to have a grenade lobbed into them, if any were to be found.

As I trawled the rooms around the underground tree, I also slowly put together a list of hiding spots, changing plays of sightlines, and certain props of the yellow-paint variety. I grasped at future sequences of actions and how challenging it would be to complete them, given what I understood about my still-unseen aggressor. Again, might sound like knowing too much in advance, but therein lies the wickedness. Having allowed you to understand the overall nature of the trap, to settle in as armchair designer, Routine lets you burden your mind with permutations. Like Amnesia’s victims, you wield the scalpel against yourself, stockpiling scenarios while waiting for the game to finally take the knife from your hands.

Lunar Software manage to raise the tension while sort of hiding nothing, in a way I haven’t quite experienced in any other horror game. One random document more or less spells out the eventual, sadistically belated scripted emergence, but it managed to scare the pants off me anyway.

I do find it masterful. But I fear I’m overegging the Kane-pudding. I played Routine in parallel to Santa Ragione’s Horses (review up very shortly), a rather more… complicated horror production, though a curiously similar one in terms of its shared interest in older media technologies, and I do think I’ve come to see Lunar Software’s project as a reprieve. So here’s an unceremonious list of things that might turn you off.

Firstly, and just in case it wasn’t obvious, do not play Routine if you hate hiding from things you can’t kill, or trying to solve puzzles while hiding from those things. The CAT scanner can be repurposed as a weapon, but not a lethal one, and you’ll run out of battery power quickly if you try to Vasquez the opposition. There are lots of replacement batteries around, but they’re just rare enough that you might keep a note of their locations.

Don’t play Routine if you can’t bear manual savepoints that are not only relatively far apart – or feel that way, given your character’s lumbering spacesuit movement – but have to be activated by synching up your CAT over wireless. Do not play Routine if you hate backtracking from one part of a puzzle to another, either, and definitely do not play Routine if you can’t abide the thunderous tramping of an avatar’s feet – the sound design’s one failing.

Do not play Routine if you need modcons such as maps or minimaps, or an always-available codex carrying every hint or document you’ve looked at. Such bits and pieces are mostly found on computers within the world. Shout-out for how your look controls synch to the in-game terminal cursor when you approach – it’s just fiddly enough to raise your hackles when you’re in a hurry, which you usually are. Don’t play Routine if you like good gunfeel. Your CAT is a flexible device, but also a winningly ungainly one: you’ll need to reset the display after passing through a strong magnetic field, if you want to shoot straight, and there’s no tactical hotkeying between firemodes when push comes to AIEEEE.

You can’t change modes while crouched under tables either, but that’s less of an issue, because you’re seldom safer than when crouched under a table. If Routine’s enemy design has an obvious belief-scuppering flaw, it’s a strange disinclination to bend over.

Do play Routine if you enjoy actually good jump scares – scares that arise convincingly and organically from the behaviour of entities who are never more dreadful than when utterly silent and still. And do play Routine if you like epistolary sci-fi backstory. There are a lot of missing people to get to know through collected correspondence, and if the writing is perhaps too spare, leaving the key personalities half-lit, don’t forget that you won’t be perusing those docs at leisure in a codex. I’m too craven to test it out in the company of anything horrendous, but I’m not sure the pause button actually pauses anything.

The story is more Solaris, 2001: Space Odyssey and Annihilation than Dead Space or Alien, though the weaponising of tools recalls Visceral’s various mining implements. It’s all rather fey and sketchy, with passing asides on being and consciousness: “it’s like time forgot to take me with it”. The biggest mystery is your own identity, but there are also subplots of the wacky science cult variety, and reminders of the human brain’s susceptibility to odd patterns and signals. There’s also plenty of mystique bubbling through the decor, including ads for products that might have been named for Stephen King stories, and arcade parlors with singsong cabinet games that riff upon the wider terrors.

Routine is just a well-made sci-fi horror game. I wish I had a more elaborate closing note, but I’ve used up all my adjectives yammering about turbine noises and VHS-C. 2012 was a million years ago, but this elegantly cumbersome chillfest seems none the worse for the interruptions and extended spells in suspended animation. Congratulations, Lunar Software. You pulled off the moonshot. Now, let’s get the hell out of here before that thing down the hall notices me typing.

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One of the first “moving pictures” ever created is a moving picture of a horse. In the late 1870s, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge produced a series of “chronophotographs” of horses and riders, including the famous 12-frame sequence Sallie Gardner at a Gallop. I know about Muybridge’s work thanks to Jordan Peele’s film Nope, which considers the historical erasure of Sallie Gardner’s Black jockey, whose identity is disputed. Another thing that easily gets overlooked when considering these images is their contribution to the practice of horse-breeding.

Muybridge – who, incidentally, murdered his wife’s lover, which doesn’t seem wholly irrelevant here – captured the images after many years of tinkering with shutters, triggers and emulsions, but they were commissioned by the industrialist Leland Stanford, founder of the university of the same name. Stanford kept racehorses, and wanted a more precise understanding of their movements, with the obvious wider motive of being able to raise more champions; nowadays, gait analysis by means of video capture is commonplace among breeders. Muybridge’s breakthrough in terms of photographic reproduction is thus an important development in control of equine reproduction. To stretch that point a little, you could argue that the moving picture has always been a way of disciplining sex – and one animal may seem much like another, once reduced to a quantity of frames.

Those lineages combine in Santa Ragione’s ugly and disquieting artwork Horses, which explores how bodies are constrained, operated and degraded by media technologies that range from early silent movies all the way to the grotesque and choppy sorcery of videogames. Released today, the game has been rejected by Steam, the world’s largest PC gaming storefront, on the grounds of being an obscenity, based on an earlier, work-in-progress version that isn’t publicly available for review. This is both a potential financial disaster for Santa Ragione, and a torturous performance of the gameworld’s own inhibitions.

Save for some title screen footage of a pink and green meadow, Horses unfolds in shades of rickety grey. Starting the game, you catch glimpses of a film projector. It gasps to life, and from there on, everything you see implicitly emerges from that projector. You hear its soporific whirr throughout, lifted fleetingly by music that includes tracks redolent of modern horror movies, and mock-jaunty asides that recall the live piano accompaniment for older silent films. The world is otherwise soundless, which is welcome, because if Horses were fully audible it would consist mostly of screaming.

Horses entangles these cinematic devices with the workings of what could almost be a first-person Stardew Valley. It takes place on a 3D farm estate about the size of the average FPS multiplayer map, with a house, a paddock, a vegetable garden, a rolling cornfield, and an overpopulated graveyard. You are a harrowed young man of around 20, sent to the Farm by your parents to make something of yourself over two weeks of honest labour.

There are the rudiments of a conventional farming sim here – an inventory bar, tool icons and the suggestion that plants actually grow between visits – but the presentation keeps yanking you back into the realm of cinema. Dialogue is delivered by title cards. Actions such as watering the potatoes are illustrated by scratchy live footage. Sometimes you hallucinate, and the reassuringly false digital world films over with vistas of rippling, fleshy horses. There’s a kind of kinky antagonism here. Rather than being complementary in the triple-A sense of “cinematic visuals”, or working around limited resources for digital modelling and animation, it’s as though the older technologies of representation were repeatedly frustrating the younger.

The game’s “horses” are similarly at odds with themselves. They are naked and branded male and female human slaves in horse masks, their genitals, breasts, and arseholes blurred out so as to perform a double brutalisation – at once stripping them bare, and pixelating them in disgust.

The depiction of the “horses” recalls the actual treatment of slaves throughout what we are pleased to call civilization, but there are also ironic references to how certain videogame conventions perform bodily subjection, in echo of Leland Stanford’s designs for the emerging technology of chronophotography. One day, you’re sent to round up two stray “horses”. This involves adding them to your hotbar inventory like items, via the button prompt “tame”. In the process, you’re shown a rotatable T-posed character model, a spectacle familiar from countless asset libraries. Get it? Tame-posed.

The only thing more unnerving than the “horses” is the Farmer. He is how Shrek might appear in David Lynch’s Eraserhead, an ogreish fatberg in creased and bulbous overalls, his eyes diabolically frail and white beneath his screwed-on hat, his teeth slightly bared as he looms over you in dialogue. He is an abomination – but he is also your host, the person who prepares your meals and pins a list of chores to the wall outside. These tasks range from feeding the farm’s “dog” to forcing a “horse” to pull a plough, all performed by clicking on things, with absolutely no “skill” element beyond deciding how much revulsion to express in dialogue with the Farmer. In the process of doing your dailies, you also learn a little more about the situation on the Farm, and naturally, you look for opportunities to misbehave.

Above all else, you are instructed not to let the “horses” have sex, because the Farmer is both horribly lustful and mortally afraid of sex, to the extent that his own desires have become indistinguishable from his terror, and must be handed over to others to perform. When intoxicated after dark, he has his “dog” rape and abuse the “horses” while he himself stands aside in costume and a chastity belt, fumbling at his thighs.

These nocturnal scenes are hard to distinguish from your own dreams, as you fall under the Farmer’s spell. It’s swiftly apparent that he sees you as an heir, to be moulded through graft and other ceremonies of dominance, especially the sharing of food. The three biscuits he bakes you for breakfast are stamped with symbols of the previous day’s obscenities. Gulping all three down is a squeamish little schoolboy rite of acceptance, like humming the melody for a racist nursery rhyme. Shunning them has no penalty, as far as I can tell – you can get by without breakfast – but feels like a dangerous provocation.

The Farmer’s weaponisation of mealtimes notwithstanding, Horses is possibly more revolted by eating than sex, inasmuch as it seems unsure how to contain and punish the sensuality of eating. At dinner you’re treated to sickly accelerated visuals of smacking lips and teeth, with sound effects that never quite match what you’re eating.

For most of the game, your agency as player is required only inasmuch as this allows you to be disempowered. Refuse the Farmer – whether it be saying no to a second helping of meat, or declining to castrate a pinioned “horse” – and he’ll jovially insist, and the game won’t let you refuse again. Perhaps the aim is to test whether you’re willing to say no regardless, or perhaps Horses simply needs you to think you have free will, so that it can get off on the thrill of denying you.

The “choices” are about investigating your own impotence, in other words. Later on you acquire a gun, videogaming’s favourite “verb”, but no ammunition. The gun is eventually used by somebody else, and not as a gun. There’s also a “save the damsel” subplot, videogaming’s other classic verb, but this is thwarted and respun as a softcore daydream, with the Farmer rubbing his thighs from the other side of a screen as he watches you abscond with the “princess”.

The above scenario is a reminder of the projector clattering away behind you, the player of Horses. That projector and the Farmer are one and the same abuser. The machine discharges his pious, voyeuristic need to be estranged from his own sexuality, to experience it as a moving picture. The game’s many rapes, beatings and scenes of self-flagellation are appropriately machinic and abortive, the beginning and end of each animation failing to knit. It’s like watching somebody trying to remember how to jerk off, automatic and listless, even subjectless. The suffering isn’t really inflicted by a character, but unthinkingly enacted by the game’s own technology. However vile the pixel-bruised imagery of welts and amputations, the mayhem is always structural and in a bizarre way, disembodied, even dispassionate. It is merely the action of this world. It just… is.

I wonder if that reflects primary developer Andrea Lucco Borlera’s debts to Surrealist film, which – here and in general – risk being reduced to the commonplace idea of the surreal as simply “weird”. I’m no student of Surrealist cinema, but if I take anything from, say, The Seashell and the Clergyman, it’s that there are no people in those artworks. There are only images carried and convulsed by subconscious flows that are at once revealed and hidden by the camera. In practice, however, this framing doesn’t quite apply to Horses, which does have a plot and individual characters with histories mentioned in scattered letters and dialogue, and there is naturally the risk of too-easy exculpation in the suggestion that the violence is structural, not individual – a risk that needs to be investigated, because individuals as awful as this do exist, and Horses is broadly a story about refusing to become one.

It isn’t just the Farmer: at intervals the Farm has visitors, including a supplier and his garishly made-up adult daughter, all of whom appear comfortable with the carnage, inasmuch as they allow themselves to perceive the violence as violence and the “horses” as people. When the Farmer and his buddies discuss the euphemistic ‘deviancy’ they wish to punish, they refer primarily to religion, but ultimately to the crushing machinery of common-sense morality, what ‘everybody knows’. As the supplier’s daughter tells you, while literally riding on the shoulders of a naked slave: “the way they used to live… a lot of people find that unacceptable. I don’t care, personally. But usually, people exhibiting immoral behaviour also have dangerous ideas.”

The supplier’s daughter is a tricky figure because she is both the voice of the censor – her callous remarks an elaboration of Steam’s storewide prohibition on “content that is patently offensive or intended to shock or disgust viewers” – and also, the probable reason for Steam declining to platform the game. Inasmuch as can be told from Santa Ragione’s own account of events, an earlier, work-in-progress build of Horses featured a version of the character the platform holder’s content reviewers deemed to be plausibly underage, with Valve telling Santa Ragione “we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor”.

In choosing to make this fact public before release, and accuse Valve of censorship while defending their game against the charge of child sexual abuse material, Santa Ragione have struck a Faustian bargain. On the one hand, Horses now has a profile it likely wouldn’t have had, if the developers had released it on other storefronts without comment. On the other, the game we have today is haunted by an earlier, seemingly vanished version of itself that is now the subject of widespread speculation – in good and bad faith.

The complexity here is that Horses is about the sexuality of younger people, even if none of the characters are actually minors. The Farmer is the way he is because of how he was raised – there are doodles and a home video that obviously date back to his early teenage years – and now, he is trying to pass those brutal values onto you. The moral is about how puritanism may reproduce across generations, even when taken to the extent that congress becomes impossible, which necessitates certain other, shambolically crude and fantastical approaches to securing a legacy. That your character is a legal adult is a technicality: the game frames you as a mute child, peering up at the Farmer while eating, struggling to say no by means of emojis and shakes of your head. It’s easy to imagine the fable playing out exactly the same way if the protagonist were in their early to mid teens.

Still, I can only comment on the game I’ve played. “Dangerous ideas are a concern for everyone,” the supplier’s daughter tells you. “Because if the machine jams, everything falls apart.” That’s what bodily reproduction is in Horses – a jamming of the mechanism of audiovisual reproduction that performs this social order, that preserves the abysmal mutant sterility of this awful world. The camera fucks. The participants are props, scenery, special effects.

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A game where music is illegal and you do crimes. It’s the perfect tone-setting tagline for Unbeatable, a rhythm game about a bunch of young adults (and one child) rebelling against an oppressive regime by playing raucous garage rock.

There are two sides to Unbeatable (which the game insists should be written in all caps or no caps, but in the spirit of rebellion I will be defying this request). The A-side is the story of the aforementioned rebels as they form a four-piece band (also called Unbeatable) and take on anti-music cops, blending visual novel storytelling and assorted action sequences. The B-side is Arcade mode, where the only goal is to get better at playing through a collection of original songs.

Both modes are built around a basic rhythm mechanic. Your character stands in between two tracks, one above and one below, and notes fly in for you to hit in time with the beat. This is mixed up with notes that must be dodged instead of hit, notes that fly onto the other track when hit and must be hit a second time, notes that must be held, or notes that require you to mash the buttons like you’re hammering out a drum solo (the best kind). Since there are only two buttons to concern yourself with, it’s incredibly easy to pick up, but as the difficulty increases and the song charts get more complex, it can get hectic.

Because of the simplicity of all this, there are multiple options available to adjust which buttons correspond to up and down. If you’re using a controller, like I was, I strongly recommend switching to the shoulders/triggers for up and D-pad/face buttons for down. The default was left and right shoulders for down and up, which broke my brain when notes started switching between left and right sides of the screen. Controller and keyboard inputs can be changed independently of each other too.

Story mode plays with this in a number of interesting ways. Sometimes it’s a fight sequence, where the appearance of the notes changes, and each successful hit on the beat leads you to punching an opponent. Other sequences merely ask you to press a button on the beat like a QTE, with the most notable being a batting cage minigame that slowly drove me insane with its weird variable timings.

Story mode is where the heart of Unbeatable can be found. You play as Beat, a down-and-out slacker who wakes up in a field, and is roped into helping out a twelve-year-old girl named Quaver who wants to investigate what happened to her musician mother. This leads to a run-in with H.A.R.M., short for Harmonics and Resonance Management, an organisation whose job is to take down illegal musicians. The two then team up with the twins Treble and Clef, starting a band with the goal of taking the fight to H.A.R.M. through the Almighty Power of Rock. Incredibly cheesy, of course, but it’s the kind of cheese I’ll happily devour every single time.

That said, Unbeatable’s story doesn’t always put its best drum-pedalling foot forward. After a linear introductory episode, we’re immediately sent to prison for a series of repetitive, menial tasks. It’s strange sequence to frontload the game with, as it kills the pacing right out of the gate. Thankfully it doesn’t last, as the episode ends in a prison break sequence that reveals just how much the team at D-Cell (correctly) love Jet Set Radio before things properly kick into gear in the remaining episodes.

If you’ve enjoyed any kind of Scott Pilgrim media, you’ll know what the vibe is here. Musicians are powerful fighters and the villains are anime caricatures (complimentary). In these middle chapters, there’s a greater sense of freedom, allowing you to rock out with new songs, play The Floor is Lava in a traffic jam, defiantly throw up posters over H.A.R.M. propaganda and, yes, hit the batting cages. But you can also explore and find moments of quiet reflection, emphasising the joy of simply taking inspiration from the world around you and turning it into music.

This is all complemented by a unique DIY aesthetic, one which draws heavily from anime and zine culture in equal measure. The flat sprites on 3D backdrops give a paper-cutout look, while the animated sequences feel like they fell out of a cult anime from the 90s, right down to a shift into a 4:3 aspect ratio. It does go a bit wonky sometimes, as scene transitions and fight sequences often cause sprites to land in weird places. It’s not clear if this is something that will be fixed in the final release, but while it is a little jarring, it does little to harm the experience and even manages to work with the game’s scrappy, handmade charm.

While I expected Unbeatable’s brash punk tone, I didn’t expect how much the story also veers off into dreamlike surrealism. H.A.R.M. exist because something mysterious and terrible happened prior to the game’s events and Beat herself is also surrounded in mystery. No one seems to know anything about where she came from, and she keeps drifting off into strange dreams set in a void bathed in sunset.

Sadly, these two elements never truly felt like they paid off for me. The incident that sparked everything is never truly elaborated on, while the penultimate chapter provides revelations about Beat that end up contradicting what we learn in the final one. There are clearly some cool concepts at work here, but at best it feels like something important was left on the cutting room floor, and at worst it can feel like the worldbuilding was made up as the team went along.

However, there is a line in the final chapter – “music is feeling” – that sums up where the writing excels. It fumbles on the external worldbuilding but on the internal elements (characters, feelings, relationships), it sings at the top of its lungs. The core band are a bunch of weirdos who are constantly bantering with each other, and much of the game’s humour comes from Clef being an aggressive loudmouth, Beat being constantly sarcastic, Treble being awkward, and Quaver being “like five” (she is twelve). This is a group I want to hang out with more, as messy and contradictory they all are.

Messy and contradictory is the key takeaway here. At its core, Unbeatable is a story of a young woman trying to find her place in a world that rejects her. Beat is a mess of insecurities, which the game never shies away from exploring. This is especially true in the game’s final chapter, a deeply emotive and admirably earnest delve into the value of relationships and the power of human creativity. It all builds up to a triumphant final song that hammers the message home and brushes away all of the story’s weaker elements. This climax hits hard in ways I did not expect from the silly punk rock rhythm game. I challenge you not to shed a tear. I certainly failed.

However, after taking about ten hours to get through the story, the real meat of Unbeatable can be found in Arcade mode, which presents a huge list of songs, split into four categories: songs by Unbeatable (the band), additional non-diegetic music from Story mode, remixes of the previous two categories, and a secret fourth category that is best discovered for yourself. Anyone who’s played a Guitar Hero or similar rhythm game can guess how this is structured: select your song and your difficulty and then play through them with the goal of racking up the best scores possible.

It’s not just score-chasing though, as Arcade mode is built heavily around the Challenge Board, a wide selection of cryptic achievements that unlock online titles, new characters, and new songs. Some of these are obvious or will just naturally unlock as you play the story, while others are completely baffling. But that’s the draw here. These challenges are designed to keep you coming back, figuring out the clues and experimenting until something clicks. And since I keep loading the game up because I think I’ve figured out a clue later and want to try out my theory, it’s clearly working.

It also helps that the song selection is consistently excellent. It’s surprisingly varied, including grungy garage rock, ambient electronica, high intensity jungle, and Hideki Naganuma-inspired breakbeat, all of it catchy and addictive. The only critique I have of the tune selection is that the soundtrack officially releases at the end of December rather than right now. This is another reason I keep loading the game back up, because I have to hear more of these songs.

I also would have liked to see Arcade mode offer selectable, or at least a wider assortment of, backdrops. While the story features a range of settings, with action taking place in concert halls, warehouse hideouts, dreamscapes and more, every stage of Arcade mode sticks you in the same rural Japanese train station. This is especially jarring for the song Waiting, which in the story features a train chase and Quaver wailing out a guitar solo behind the action, while in Arcade mode it’s… just the train station. For a game so confident in its art direction and themes of self-expression, the lack of different background options feels like an oversight. It’s a relatively small thing, but it did bother me enough to wonder why it wasn’t there.

Much like the titular band, Unbeatable is a game that doesn’t always hit the right notes but exudes so much heart and enthusiasm that it’s hard not to fall in love. It’s a sincere celebration of the creative spirit that overcomes its own rough edges by getting everything right where it counts. This is a song you’ll want to stick on repeat.

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When I think of Idols of Ash, I think of seven sounds, listed here in order of deepening dreadfulness. The first and nicest sound is the clink of my silvery grapple sinking its hook, interrupting the rush of air past my ears as I fall. That’s the second, less nice sound. The third sound is a distant, tectonic groaning, disconsolate and wakeful: it could be the wind again, pushing through some unaccountably musical lungful of stone. Yeah, I’m sure that’s all it is.

The fourth sound is definitely not the wind: a squeaky, squidgy rumination, like the cooing of idle pigeons. You hear that cooing and you start running, because it generally precedes the fifth sound, the stiletto rattle of chitinous feet. When the legs are close, there’s the sixth sound, a rasping, gaping hiss, and it’s time to yeet yourself into the chasm while hurling your grapple towards the nearest jutting surface. With any luck, you will not then hear the seventh sound: the thud of your hook bouncing off the rock.

Idols of Ash casts you as a bereaved spelunker who is trying to reach the bottom of a sunken, sandy megastructure, while avoiding the attentions of an unpredictably spawning giant centipede. You may have already encountered the centipede on social media. It’s catnip for the reaction-farmers, a segmented, scurrying hellbeast that rivets the eye and frenzies the bladder. You spy that thing zig-zagging around a cavern roof and all thought of route-planning evaporates, as you resort to the ultimate sprint button: gravity. Your character’s health bar can handle the odd nip or plummet, but you have no means of defending yourself.

Still, the centipede is just the supporting act. By dint of how it hurries you along and also, how ingeniously it navigates the contours – tick tick tick – the Creature sharpens your appreciation for the megastructure itself: a kilometre’s depth of hanging archways, inverted towers, vertical pipes with carefully spaced protrusions, sloping slabs, and ashen kilns ringed by spectral vegetation. Marked from afar by gouts of green light, the kilns are both waypoints and checkpoints. Breathe in the ash and it will “remember you”, teasing out a few sentences of your character’s past.

The world is a cancellous abstraction, like something out of NaissancE, but also a convincingly built and deteriorating place, where unrecognisable planes gather into what could almost be streets. I wonder how much of this ambient indecision is inherent to any catacomb or mausoleum, architectures built to accommodate, or entrap entities that no longer need any earthly dwelling. I’m similarly uncertain about the little limbless statues you find, huddled around hovering flames that restore your health. The statues look humanoid when upright, but they’re worryingly grublike when teetered over. Perhaps they are really the Creature’s eggs. Perhaps this isn’t a tomb, but simply a nest, with human vestiges grown to lure the unwary wanderer seeking catharsis underground.

The story is told by way of those kiln memories and a couple of cutscenes. It’s a brief tale of loss and despair – the first run takes maybe an hour, and you could fit all the text on one page – with a slightly cumbersome exposition dump at the end. I otherwise admire the writing’s sparseness and pungency, the repeated line about the ash “remembering you” being a wonderfully predatory framing that reminds me of the Shalebridge Cradle. Still, I think I’d have preferred Idols of Ash to be devoid of even these sparing bits of backstory. The larval stalagmites and ash piles don’t need any ‘grounding’. Coleridge’s much-abused exhortation to suspend disbelief takes on new resonance when you’re dangling from a rope with a nightmare arthropod at the other end.

Complete the game, and you’ll belatedly realise that Idols of Ash is designed for speedrunners. The grappling physics are both intuitive and rewarding to experiment with. You start by learning the length of the rope, indicated on the HUD, and mastering the speed and trajectory of the hook’s flight. Sometimes, the distance between ledges is exactly the length of the rope, but the gaps increase as you descend, and some of the ‘routes’ prove to be dead ends – extremely unpleasant, when the Creature is close behind. Then you learn to use the hook while falling. You also learn to use it on the flat, leaping and grappling for a speed boost. With practice, you can be a passable Spider-Man, swooping from arch to arch. Except that Spider-Man is not a fun parallel, here. Tick tick tick.

There’s a harder mode to unlock, in which the Creature is more aggressive and tenacious. Better yet, there are a couple more maps. Best of all, there are inverted maps that invest the terrain you insolently tumbled through with new deviousness. If you survive these and are up for more, the logical next port of call is the rather more technical White Knuckle. Or if you don’t want to feel all spooked and depressed while spelunking, why not take a swing at lovely freebie Grimhook.

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